FAMOUS ESSAY by Rafael Lemkin, New York, NY, 1953[Text was probably originally composed for Lemkin’s address at the
1953 UkrainianFamine commemoration in New York. Later Lemkin added it to the material
he wasgathering for his elaborate History of Genocide which was never
published. Ed, Roman Serbyn.]"Holodomor Studies" Journal, Vol. 1, Issue 1, Winter-Spring 2009,
Pages 3-8Charles Schlacks, Publisher, Idyllwild, CA

The mass murder of peoples and of nations that has characterized the
advance of the Soviet Union into Europe is not a new feature of their policy
of expansionism, it is not an innovation devised simply to bring uniformity
out of the diversity of Poles, Hungarians, Balts, Romanians – presently
disappearing into the fringes of their empire. Instead, it has been a long-term
characteristic even of the internal policy of the Kremlin – one which the
present masters had ample precedent for in the operations of Tsarist Russia.
It is indeed an indispensable step in the process of “union” that the Soviet
leaders fondly hope will produce the “Soviet Man,” the “Soviet Nation,”
and to achieve that goal, that unified nation, the leaders of the Kremlin
will gladly destroy the nations and the cultures that have long inhabited
Eastern Europe.

What I want to speak about is perhaps the classic example of Soviet
genocide, its longest and broadest experiment in Russification – the destruction
of the Ukrainian nation. This is, as I have said, only the logical successor
of such Tsarist crimes as the drowning of 10,000 Crimean Tatars by order
of Catherine the Great, the mass murders of Ivan the Terrible’s “SS troops”
– the Oprichnina; the extermination of National Polish leaders and Ukrainian
Catholics by Nicholas I; and the series of Jewish pogroms that have stained
Russian history periodically. And it has had its matches within the Soviet
Union in the annihilation of the Ingerian nation, the Don and Kuban Cossacks,
the Crimean Tatar Republics, the Baltic Nations of Lithuania, Estonia and
Latvia. Each is a case in the long-term policy of liquidation of non-Russian
peoples by the removal of select parts.

Ukraine constitutes a slice of Southeastern USSR equal in area to France
and Italy, and inhabited by some 30 million people.[2] Itself the Russian
bread basket, geography has made it a strategic key to the oil of the Caucasus
and Iran, and to the entire Arab world. In the north, it borders Russia
proper. As long as Ukraine retains its national unity, as long as its people
continue to think of themselves as Ukrainians and to seek independence,
so long Ukraine poses a serious threat to the very heart of Sovietism.

It is no wonder that the Communist leaders have attached the greatest
importance to the Russification of this independent [minded – R.S.] member
of their “Union of Republics,” have determined to remake it to fit their
pattern of one Russian nation. For the Ukrainian is not and has never been,
a Russian. His culture, his temperament, his language, his religion – all
are different. At the side door to Moscow, he has refused to be collectivized,
accepting deportation, even death. And so it is peculiarly important that
the Ukrainian be fitted into the procrustean pattern of the ideal Soviet
man.

Ukraine is highly susceptible to racial murder by select parts and so
the Communist tactics there have not followed the pattern taken by the
German attacks against the Jews. The nation is too populous to be exterminated
completely with any efficiency. However, its leadership, religious, intellectual,
political, its select and determining parts, are quite small and therefore
easily eliminated, and so it is upon these groups particularly that the
full force of the Soviet axe has fallen, with its familiar tools of mass
murder, deportation and forced labor, exile and starvation.

The attack has manifested a systematic pattern, with the whole process
repeated again and again to meet fresh outburst of national spirit. The
first blow is aimed at the intelligentsia, the national brain, so as to
paralyze the rest of the body. In 1920, 1926 and again in 1930-33, teachers,
writers, artists, thinkers, political leaders, were liquidated, imprisoned
or deported. According to the Ukrainian Quarterly of Autumn 1948, 51,713
intellectuals were sent to Siberia in 1931 alone. At least 114 major poets,
writers and artists, the most prominent cultural leaders of the nation,
have met the same fate. It is conservatively estimated that at least 75
percent of the Ukrainian intellectuals and professional men in Western
Ukraine, Carpatho-Ukraine and Bukovina have been brutally exterminated
by the Russians. (Ibid., Summer 1949).

Going along with this attack on the intelligentsia was an offensive
against the churches, priests and hierarchy, the “soul” of Ukraine. Between
1926 and 1932, the Ukrainian Orthodox Autocephalous Church, its Metropolitan
(Lypkivsky) and 10,000 clergy were liquidated. In 1945, when the Soviets
established themselves in Western Ukraine, a similar fate was meted out
to the Ukrainian Catholic Church. That Russification was the only issue
involved is clearly demonstrated by the fact that before its liquidation,
the Church was offered the opportunity to join the Russian Patriarch[ate]
at Moscow, the Kremlin’s political tool.

Only two weeks before the San Francisco conference, on April 11, 1945,
a detachment of NKVD troops surrounded the St. George Cathedral in Lviv
and arrested Metropolitan Slipyj, two bishops, two prelates and several
priests. [3] All the students in the city’s theological seminary were driven
from the school, while their professors were told that the Ukrainian Greek
Catholic Church had ceased to exist, that its Metropolitan was arrested
and his place was to be take by a Soviet-appointed bishop. These acts were
repeated all over Western Ukraine and across the Curzon Line in Poland.
[4] At least seven bishops were arrested or were never heard from again.
There is no Bishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Church still free in the area.
Five hundred clergy who met to protest the action of the Soviets, were
shot or arrested.

Throughout the entire region, clergy and laity were killed by hundreds,
while the number sent to forced labor camps ran into the thousands. Whole
villages were depopulated. In the deportation, families were deliberately
separated, fathers to Siberia, mothers to the brickworks of Turkestan,
and the children to Communist homes to be “educated”. For the crime of
being Ukrainian, the Church itself was declared a society detrimental to
the welfare of the Soviet state, its members were marked down in the Soviet
police files as potential “enemies of the people.” As a matter of fact,
with the exception of 150,000 members in Slovakia, the Ukrainian Catholic
Church has been officially liquidated, its hierarchy imprisoned, its clergy
dispersed and deported.

These attacks on the Soul have also had and will continue to have a
serious effect on the Brain of Ukraine, for it is the families of the clergy
that have traditionally supplied a large part of the intellectuals, while
the priests themselves have been the leaders of the villages, their wives
the heads of the charitable organizations. The religious orders ran schools,
took care of much of the organized charities.

The third prong of the Soviet plan was aimed at the farmers, the large
mass of independent peasants who are the repository of the tradition, folk
lore and music, the national language and literature, the national spirit,
of Ukraine. The weapon used against this body is perhaps the most terrible
of all – starvation. Between 1932 and 1933, 5,000,000 Ukrainians starved
to death, an inhumanity which the 73rd Congress decried on May 28, 1934.[5]
There has been an attempt to dismiss this highpoint of Soviet cruelty as
an economic policy connected with the collectivization of the wheat lands,
and the elimination of the kulaks, the independent farmers was therefore
necessary. The fact is, however, that large-scale farmers in Ukraine were
few and far-between. As a Soviet writer Kosior [6] declared in Izvestiia
on December 2, 1933, “Ukrainian nationalism is our chief danger,” and it
was to eliminate that nationalism, to establish the horrifying uniformity
of the Soviet state that the Ukrainian peasantry was sacrificed. The method
used in this part of the plan was not at all restricted to any particular
group. All suffered – men, women, children.

The crop that year was ample to feed the people and livestock of Ukraine,
though it had fallen off somewhat from the previous year, a decrease probably
due in large measure to the struggle over collectivization. But a famine
was necessary for the Soviet and so they got one to order, by plan, through
an unusually high grain allotment to the state as taxes. To add to this,
thousands of acres of wheat were never harvested, were left to rot in the
fields. The rest was sent to government granaries to be stored there until
the authorities had decided how to allocate it. Much of this crop, so vital
to the lives of the Ukrainian people, ended up as exports for the creation
of credits abroad.

In the face of famine on the farms, thousands abandoned the rural areas
and moved into the towns to beg food. Caught there and sent back to the
country, they abandoned their children in the hope that they at least might
survive. In this way, 18,000 children were abandoned in Kharkiv alone.
Villages of a thousand had a surviving population of a hundred; in others,
half the populace was gone, and deaths in these towns ranged from 20 to
30 per day. Cannibalism became commonplace.

As C. Henry Chamberlain, [7] the Moscow correspondent of the Christian
Science Monitor, wrote in 1933:

The Communists saw
in this apathy and discouragement, sabotage and counter-revolution, and,
with the ruthlessness peculiar to self-righteous
idealists, they decided
to let the famine run its course with the idea that it would teach the
peasants a lesson.

Relief was doled out
to the collective farms, but on an inadequate scale and so late that many
lives had already been lost. The individual peasants
were left to shift
for themselves; and much higher mortality rate among the individual peasants
proved a most potent argument in favor of joining
collective farms.

The fourth step in the process consisted in the fragmentation of the
Ukrainian people at once by the addition to Ukraine of foreign peoples
and by the dispersion of the Ukrainians throughout Eastern Europe. In this
way, ethnic unity would be destroyed and nationalities mixed. Between 1920
and 1939, the population of Ukraine changed from 80 percent Ukrainian to
only 63 percent.[8] In the face of famine and deportation, the Ukrainian
population had declined absolutely from 23.2 million to 19.6 million, while
the non-Ukrainian population had increased by 5.6 million. When we consider
that Ukraine once had the highest rate of population increase in Europe,
around 800,000 per year, it is easy to see that the Russian policy has
been accomplished.

These have been the chief steps in the systematic destruction of the
Ukrainian nation, in its progressive absorption within the new Soviet nation.
Notably, there have been no attempts at complete annihilation, such as
was the method of the German attack on the Jews. And yet, if the Soviet
program succeeds completely, if the intelligentsia, the priests and the
peasants can be eliminated, Ukraine will be as dead as if every Ukrainian
were killed, for it will have lost that part of it which has kept and developed
its culture, its beliefs, its common ideas, which have guided it and given
it a soul, which, in short, made it a nation rather than a mass of people.

The mass, indiscriminate murders have not, however, been lacking – they
have simply not been integral parts of the plan, but only chance variations.
Thousands have been executed, untold thousands have disappeared into the
certain death of Siberian labor camps.

The city of Vinnitsa might well be called the Ukrainian Dachau. In
91 graves there lie the bodies of 9,432 victims of Soviet tyranny, shot
by the NKVD in about 1937 or 1938. Among the gravestones of real cemeteries,
in woods, with awful irony, under a dance floor, the bodies lay from 1937
until their discovery by the Germans in 1943. Many of the victims had been
reported by the Soviets as exiled to Siberia.

Ukraine has its Lidice too, in the town of Zavadka, destroyed by the
Polish satellites of the Kremlin in 1946.[9] Three times, troops of the
Polish Second Division attacked the town, killing men, women and children,
burning houses and stealing farm animals. During the second raid, the Red
commander told what was left of the town’s populace: “The same fate will
be met by everyone who refuses to go to Ukraine. I therefore order that
within three days the village be vacated; otherwise, I shall execute every
one of you.”

From DEATH AND DEVASTATION
ON THE
CURZON LINE by Walter
Dushnyck

When the town was finally evacuated by force, there remained only 4
men among the 78 survivors. During March of the same year, 2 other Ukrainian
towns were attacked by the same Red unit and received more or less similar
treatment.

What we have seen here is not confined to Ukraine. The plan that the
Soviets used there has been and is being repeated. It is an essential part
of the Soviet program for expansion, for it offers the quick way of bringing
unity out of the diversity of cultures and nations that constitute the
Soviet Empire. That this method brings with it indescribable suffering
for millions of people has not turned them from their path. If for no other
reason than this human suffering, we would have to condemn this road to
unity as criminal. But there is more to it than that. This is not simply
a case of mass murder. It is a case of genocide, of destruction, not of
individuals only, but of a culture and a nation.

Were it possible to do this even without suffering we would still be
driven to condemn it, for the family of minds, the unity of ideas, of language
and customs that forms what we call a nation constitutes one of the most
important of all our means of civilization and progress. It is true that
nations blend together and form new nations – we have an example of this
process in our own country, – but this blending consists in the pooling
of benefits of superiorities that each culture possesses.[10] And it is
in this way that the world advances. What then, apart from the very important
question of human suffering and human rights that we find wrong with Soviet
plans is the criminal waste of civilization and of culture. For the Soviet
national unity is being created, not by any union of ideas and of cultures,
but by the complete destruction of all cultures and of all ideas save one
– the Soviet.

FOOTNOTES:
[1]. Verse by Volodymyr Sosiura added in pencil. Sosiura wrote the
patriotic poem in 1944, during the German-Soviet war. At first it was praised
by the authorities, but in 1948 it was condemned for Ukrainian nationalism.
The two verses in the Ukrainian original:
.
[2]. According to the 1959 census there are a little over 40 million
people.
[3]. The Charter creating the United Nations was signed by the delegates
of 50 countries, including the USSR and the Ukrainian SSR, at the Conference
held on April 25-26, 1945.
[4]. The Curzon Line proposed by the British as a border between Poland
and the Soviet state after the First World War eventually served as the
basis for the post-World War II border between Poland and the USSR. The
border left a large Ukrainian minority in the Polish state.
[5]. On May 28, 1934 Congressman Hamilton Fish of New York introduced
a resolution (H. Res. 309) in the House of Representatives in Washington.
The document stipulated that “several millions of the population of the
Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic” died of starvation during 1932 and
1933.” The Resolution further proposed:
“that the House of Representatives express its sympathy for all those
who suffered from the great famine in Ukraine which has brought misery,
affliction, and death to millions of peaceful and law-abiding Ukrainians”;
“that . . . the Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
. . . take active steps to alleviate the terrible consequences arising
from this famine”;
“that . . . the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Government will
place no obstacles in the way of American citizens seeking to send aid
in form of money, foodstuffs, and necessities to the famine-stricken region
of Ukraine.”
The Resolution was referred to the Committee on Foreign Relations.
(From the Ukrainian Quarterly, no. 4 [1978], pp. 416-17.)
[6]. In fact, Stanislav Kosior was the First Secretary of the Communist
Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine. In a speech delivered at the joint session
of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission of the Communist
Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine, on November 27, 1933, he stated that “at
the present moment, local Ukrainian nationalism poses the main danger.”
[7]. The correct name is W[illiam] Henry Chamberlain. Prolific writer
on Soviet affairs, he later wrote a history of the Russian Revolution.
[8]. There was no census in 1920. The official figures from the 1926
and 1939 census are somewhat different from Lemkin’s. In 1926 there were
22.9 million ethnic Ukrainians in Ukrainian SSR and the falsified 1939
figure showed 23.3 million, or an increase of 435,000 ethnic Ukrainians.
However, the rise in over-all population of Ukrainian SSR by 3.3 milllion
reduced the ethnically Ukrainian portion from 80 percent to 73 percent.
[9]. On June 10, 1942, 173 males over the age of 14 were shot, the
women and children deported and the village of Lidice razed to the ground
in reprisal for the assassination of the Nazi dictator of Moravia, Reinhard
Heydrich. Zavadka Morokhivs’ka, Sianik povit, Lemkivshchyna, now Zawadka-Morochowska,
Powiat Sanok, Poland.
[10]. Lemkin has in mind the United States.